


no mythologies

by vvolchitsa



Category: Boardwalk Empire
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Gen, flashbacks and dissociation more than once, idk what to tag this with. i am not well versed in the art of this website, meyer's perpetual disappointment in father figures and also there is magic, that's the honest and not needlessly cryptic version of the summary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 03:12:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11912022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vvolchitsa/pseuds/vvolchitsa
Summary: the only constant is change





	1. Chapter 1

Meyer remembers everything.

He remembers his escape to America, the feeling of being hidden, crouched in the belly of a monstrous iron ship as it charges across the ocean like a chariot. And the air—how it grows warmer, by degrees.

He remembers terror before that, and confusion. A swirling world of uncertainties piling onto hunger pains piling onto dirty cheeks streaked with tears.

He remembers Jake, back in Odessa, who kisses his hands and places them on the hard dirt. Then Yetta sweeps them away along with the crowds and Meyer leaves without a goodbye.

* * *

The ship pulls into America in the middle of a sunset, the country blazing with bronze light. Meyer feels like he is interrupting something, some important ritual he has no right to be privy to. Americans and Europeans swarm and crash around him, booming voices yelling in alien tongues. As his mother and brother greet Max, Meyer is silent, wide-eyed, holding his breath at the edge of a towering precipice.

But the longer he stays in America, the more at home he feels. There is violence and hate here too, but less of it, not enough to warrant fleeing. (Besides, Meyer is beginning to suspect that there will be violence and hate no matter where he goes.) There are hardships and Meyer’s family lives in poverty. They move from apartment to apartment but the cramped rooms and yawning hunger in his belly remain constant.

It is the hunger in his eyes that grows.

He learns and adapts, swallowing English words and phrases and books by the dozen. He practices math until he can rattle off answers faster than his teachers. Words and numbers shimmer in his mind like a white-gold Renaissance in the land of possibility. Meyer is well aware of his potential. He will be great someday and all the intangibilities of math and language will coalesce into something big and bright, something that his birthplace could not contain.

Yet for all this change, for all the differences between New York and Grodno, some dawns he feels something cold and hard deep inside him, forged under a sky filled with snow and packed up in his pockets, immutable.

* * *

The city streets buzz with magic. Meyer first discovers this when he and Jake get into craps, an attempt at rising out of poverty. They start by watching. The game is incredibly simple; all it requires is a pair of dice and the hapless, rabid competition of the poor.

After a few days of lurking, a lanky red-headed boy takes an interest in quiet Meyer. He introduces himself, extending a freckled hand. “C’mon, don’t be shy.”

Believing him to be innocuous, the boy shows Meyer the ropes—not that he needs them. He is miles ahead of this simple Irish boy. But when it comes to magic, he is admittedly out of his depth. The boy is the one who informally introduces him to what Meyer thought to be sleight of hand, tricks of the mind, strange American fires burning in unnatural colors. The boy doesn’t know where magic comes from, only how to tap into it and how to let it loose. It is not taught in schools or discussed in the papers, but it beats a steady pulse in the underbelly of the city regardless, flowing through back alley craps games and smoke-filled casinos alike. These street kids, craps czars, tip the odds even further in their favor with a flick of the finger. They skip school to set fires in gemstone hues, rub their hands and produce crumbs of fool’s gold, prick their fingers and out wells ink.

Shadow magic, they call it.

Meyer knows to be wary.

* * *

Jake listens when Meyer tells him not to get into this so quickly, but Benny—Meyer’s first real friend aside from his brother—demands a reason. Vicious Benny, like a molotov cocktail. He is entranced by the allure of magic right off the bat.

“All the kids running these games,” Meyer explains, “they all use magic. That’ll be our edge, a fair game, no tricks.” The odds are in their favor, magic or no magic, they both know this.

Benny pouts. It isn’t the potential profit of magic that draws him in, it’s the rush. The exhilaration that comes from living beyond human capability.

Meyer runs his tongue over his teeth and compromises. “Six months, Benny. If after six months we aren’t making more money than everyone else on this street, we’ll start using magic. Deal?”

* * *

One hundred and eighty blazing bronze sunsets come and go.

* * *

Meyer’s plan works, but Benny gets into magic anyway.

He is barred completely, however, from using it anywhere near Meyer’s games. They operate under the guise of fairness, an empty hope in such a greedy world. Maybe this is its own form of cruelty, but in the end it works and that is all they need to hear.

For the first month they do not profit much at all. Their games are not flashy or crowded, but word spreads faster than fire and soon enough they are frequented by the down-on-their-luck victims of magic, searching for a better chance. Their profits rise slowly but steadily, and surely enough by the time the sixth month rolls to a close they have silently climbed to the top of this little dirt pile.

* * *

When Meyer meets Charlie, neither of them have gotten into magic yet.

“I grew up with lotsa Sicilians,” he explains to Meyer a month or so later, after they’ve gotten a chance to warm up to each other. “It’s all _blood this blood that_ with ‘em. And I ain’t talkin’ about family or nothin’—well, that too—but I mean real blood. You hang around long enough and you start hearin’ some fucked up stories.” He pauses, eyes flicking to meet Meyer’s. “Sacrifices.”

Meyer hasn’t heard many stories about magic, fucked up or otherwise. He comes from emptiness, born under a vaulted sky. “There’s potential there, though,” he muses. “Maybe not with sacrifices. Magic in general.”

“Oh I bet.” Charlie stretches upward, catlike. “I bet those old farts ain’t figured out half of what we can do with this shit.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for some blood/gore and potentially graphic text

It is Arnold Rothstein who initiates the pair of them into magic, striding into their lives as self assured as the Brooklyn bridge. Or perhaps he doesn’t stride. Perhaps he sits behind his polished mahogany desk and manipulates the odds and with the suddenness of a fern unfurling Meyer and Charlie are seated before him, silent in the luxury.

Rothstein is absolutely nothing like Max, Meyer thinks. He is excessive, careful, elaborate; he is poker chips and strategic pauses and firm handshakes. He does not lose. Meyer, in those first days, imagines that when Rothstein comes home it is not without a single word to his family, whoever that may be. And best of all—

“I see potential in you boys.” Potential. The very thing Meyer has guarded close to his heart against all the thieves in this world, laid out on the table. He and Charlie are caught, electrified, their hearts in this stranger’s manicured hands, like entry to a walled city.

“But I do notice that neither of you are involved with magic, though many of your acquaintances are.” Rothstein steeples his fingers and takes a moment to look each of them in the eye in turn. “Was there any reason for you not to be?”

Charlie shares a glance with Meyer and sucks at his teeth. He shakes his head, body draped loosely over his chair. “Didn’t have to. We was fine without it.”

“Many of our competitors used magic,” Meyer continues. “So operating without it was actually to our benefit.”

Rothstein is silent. His eyes glide over the two of them, dressed in cheap suits, all East end cornerstones and Lucky Strikes. “Times are changing,” he says, finally. “I can help you change with them.”

That day the two of them become prized investments, ascending.

* * *

Rothstein does not ask them how much they know about magic. They are not his first apprentices; he knows magic from the streets they come from is a dirty kind, without form or strategy. But the horses he bets on do not lose.

He describes this hidden world like a passage from the Bacchae, twin suns, twin cities. “Imagine, for a moment, that our dimension is as flat and singular as this piece of paper,” he says, holding up a sheet of cream stationary. “This is the world we call home, the one we read about in newspapers and study in universities. This dimension, the mortal realm, is fundamentally separate from magic. However,” he holds up a second piece of paper, presses it flush against the first. “There is a second realm—perhaps more than these two, even, but we won’t concern ourselves with that—a second realm parallel to ours. The shadow realm, colloquially. A book is not a single page. These two dimensions, though they operate in tandem, are perceived as separated by the mortal but can be married together, producing an act of magic.”

Every individual force of life, they learn—ranging from human to cat to beetle—has a counterpart in the second realm. “Angels, they’re called, beautiful in how terrible they are. One can pierce through this divide between worlds and form a bond with their angel, and from then on it is possible to tap into this reservoir of magic.”

Meyer is enthralled. This man is a stranger, but in the best sense of the word—he is like nothing Meyer has ever known, silver-tongued opportunity incarnate. Sitting in that chair, in a suit that does not really belong to him, he imagines a world of inky blacks, royal purples, roiling clouds of smoke shot through with silver and sinuous muscle, appetites—all this just beyond his grasp.

There are, however, risks. Risk after risk after risk. It is important to be careful; all things in moderation. Energy cannot be created, nor destroyed. An act of magic thus requires dark energy drawn from one’s angel, which in turn requires a personal sacrifice of one’s own life force. Angels do not die, they convert and mutate, latching onto a new brand of life if their first is snuffed out. And a life can be snuffed out in many ways—old age, disease, a pair of hands around a throat. An excess of money, of magic; a shell of a man bled dry.

But sacrifices are necessary, though Charlie stiffens almost imperceptibly when the word is mentioned.

* * *

Initially, the initiation ritual seems deceptively simple. Meyer even thinks for a moment that it could be done by accident, one dark winter’s night under thin blankets.

The ingredients are: a small amount of your own blood, isolation in a room with no light, and a momentary loss of control as you make the first exchange with your angel. It is with this last part that Meyer knows that it would not be possible—not for him at least—to do this accidentally. Both he and Charlie take careful, measured breaths, but Charlie’s fingers tap a rapid staccato into the armrest, and Meyer feels anticipation like a stone in his chest.

“It was once common for initiations to be conducted in the wilderness, during the new moon,” Rothstein tells them on the day of theirs. “It was a rather unsafe practice, for many reasons. Generally, however, lower temperatures do help with magic.”

And so, Meyer stands in the center of a cold, bare room, stuffed with dead air, yards below the Earth’s surface. “Belly of the beast,” he murmurs, and the light winks out.

For a moment Meyer is completely disoriented, swallowed whole by the darkness. His mind blanks and he is peering over that old precipice again, he same one from his first steps on American soil. But almost immediately he rights himself, the sliver of panic dissipating into the inky black surrounding him. He is alone in an empty room, a small blade clutched in his right hand. He presses the tip into the index finger of his left hand, feels the wet warmth of blood. In some other circumstance it might have been red but here it has no color; here nothing has color.

Naturally, what should follow is the exchange, the loss of control. This is difficult; Meyer knows how to sacrifice, yes, but there are certain things he cannot afford to lose.

(Isn’t that just the ecstasy of it?” Rothstein had asked. “To gamble something so important, only to gain it back _tenfold_.” Meyer had looked out the window then, at the street below, littered with leaves.)

The room constricts with silence, a dark potential looming in the solid black. He could be anywhere, he feels. Buried in the side of a mountain, deep underground in a coal mine, surrounded by invisible riches in an Egyptian antechamber. Sweat creeps down his legs, blood pools in his cupped hand—his heart pumps and pumps and the smell of iron blooms headily into the air. “It isn’t a loss,” he whispers, and it sounds like the words are being spoken by someone else, from a messenger to whom this room is a space to pass through, not an iron cage. He shakes his head, tries to swallow whatever is welling up in his throat.

His voice is stronger the next time he speaks. “I’m not _losing_ anything.”

And suddenly—as though someone in a room far away has pulled a lever and opened a trap door beneath his feet—Meyer is back in the stomach of a massive ship, rocking back and forth in the Atlantic ocean. He stands immobile, commanded entirely by outside forces. The floor beneath him roils with bodies, a sweating ocean of moans and rags and prayers; the air is thick with shit and vomit and it all breeds together, filth with filth. A baby’s sharp cry rises out of the mire, shapeless and spiralling higher and higher until it swoops back down, and Meyer tries to follow it but he can’t _move_ —and with a jolt they are roaring into port and he is being trampled by a thousand clammy feet moving as one, thundering like his heart.

Maybe seconds pass, maybe years. The ship is deserted, ringing with silence. Meyer picks himself up and staggers into open air. But it is not warm, there are no sunsets stretching across the sea, no crowds screaming meaningless things. 

There is only the sky and the forest, both covered with a silent blanket of snow. The wild heart of the Taiga. He spins around on freezing bare feet and the ship is gone, replaced by miles of empty country, rolling hills and dipping cliffs, a quiet violence in this killing cold.

He walks through the stillness for a bit before stopping to peer into a clearing surrounded on all fronts by the heavy swooping boughs of pines. There, two figures—a woman and a boy—kneeling with their backs to him. They wear rags the color of snow. He squints, could it be? It is! “Jake! Mama!” He yells, “it’s me!” They do not move; something shifts at the edges of his vision and Meyer turns to look. It is Max, who steps out into the ring of trees with his hands placed placidly in his pockets.

A burst of noise doubles in on itself and rings around the clearing, startling Meyer, and when he looks back to his mother and brother they lay like domino pieces in the snow stained with twin streaks of red.

His world shifts again and he knows nothing but chaos and a hunger like a sword in his guts. He is running through the woods at night, running from invisible serpentine creatures that twine themselves around his calves and ankles until he trips and falls and crawls on bloody hands through the snow. There is barbed wire in his chest and his fingers have been torn to ribbons and he is kneeling at the bank of a steaming river. He is at a meeting in a dimly lit room, there is a man with a cut across his palm, there is blood in their wineglasses and it billows upwards into the air like ink. He knows the curves and contours of taut golden flesh all around him, hot and blossoming with bruises like wildflowers, and as he squeezes his eyes shut he feels the most exquisite pain, building to a crescendo. Fires and gunshots and crying and pleading and faceless men in heavy boots carrying heavy guns swarming through the streets like locusts. He opens his eyes to find himself in his childhood home, his first home—but the closets are stuffed with deer carcasses with their throats torn out, pomegranates impaled on their antlers, cold white fires blazing in the doorways.

* * *

Meyer wakes up three hours later with his blood on the ceiling.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hover over the italicized non-english text for a translation, unless you're not on desktop in which case the translations are in the end notes!

Fresh snow had fallen that day, and Meyer and Charlie had gone out for drinks, if just to sit somewhere warm and lit and cheerful. The ice had rattled in their glasses, and Meyer noticed how Charlie had hid his left hand in his coat.

Nowadays, they still go out for drink sometimes, but their ice doesn’t rattle anymore.

“That was the hardest step,” Arnold told them. “Whatever you saw while—“

“I didn’t see _shit_ ,” Charlie muttered, eyes boring holes into the floor. “I didn’t see nothin’.”

There was a pause before Arnold had continued. “Whatever you _saw_ , your angel was not a part of it, I want to make that distinction clear. It isn’t possible to see them without an external aid. You may have some doubts about whether or not you’ve managed to make contact.” Meyer had no doubts. “Well. I don’t think I’ve had any other students manage to break so successfully into the second realm.” He had smiled at them as though they had a reason to be proud. “I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

* * *

After the initiation Meyer feels like he is stepping into America for the first time all over again. In a way, he supposes, he is. There is so much to learn and he is still so young. He can’t help but be reminded of learning English, learning American customs and laws and habits. The rules of the street and the rules everywhere else. Which corners he knows like a king, and which as an outlaw—a detailed map of handshakes, switchblades; dirty fingernails, bruised knuckles.

He and Charlie are no strangers to learning through experience. They dip their toes in together;Meyer reads old books wrapped in leather or Persian cloth, relays the information, and they experiment.

What most street kids don’t know is that there are different brands of magic, like languages. (Are there dead kinds of magic, Meyer wonders, if there are dead languages? What was the last word spoken when Old Latin had thrived?) Something about written magic comforts him, these spells in the form of poems. Once in a while, usually at night, as he watches bugs squirm in the corners of the ceiling, a snippet will bubble up in his mind and he’ll let it turn over and over there, careful never to speak it.

_Byłem u Ciebie w te dni przedostatnie_  
_Nie docieczonego wątku -- --_  
_\-- Pełne, jak Mit,_  
_Blade, jak świt..._  
_\-- Gdy życia koniec szepce do początku:_  
_„Nie stargam Cię ja -- nie! -- Ja, u-wydatnię!...”_  


This particular kind of magic is especially popular in Eastern Europe; he finds spells in Russian, Polish, even Yiddish once in a while. He notices that if translated, the potency of the spell is diluted. There’s a certain beauty in that, he thinks, in keeping parts of yourself sheltered from the winds of change.

Charlie doesn’t take to this brand very much, and it can be rather tedious, Meyer will admit. Once in a while they will recite a protection spell before leaving—for all its faults, it’s an efficient brand when it comes to the amount of life force lost, doesn’t take much out of you—but the rest Meyer memorizes on his own, silently, in the free time that dwindles as the years go by.

Probability manipulation is where Meyer shines, like Rothstein before him. It’s all strategy; the key is to skew small events so that they collapse into the bigger picture in his mind. He wins small battles and the war turns bit by bit to his favor. He hears stories of politicians mislabelling greed as ambition, pricking their fingers in dark rooms and manipulating entire elections to their benefit. They are dead by morning, emaciated. Their angels take all.

(The trick there, Meyer decides, would have been to manipulate certain conversations, certain debates—carefully. It is not possible to manipulate the actions of another living being, not without a blood pact, only the effects of their autonomy. This can be enough. But Meyer has no interest in politics, not beyond its overlap with business.)

Street magic is Benny’s domain, all flashing lights and loud bangs like symphonies reverberating through the gutters. It is the intoxicating pink smoke weighing down the patrons of strip clubs and the words the girls whisper, cash registers bursting open unbidden, young hands in gaudy suits reaping the spoils. Benny lives like a king of a violent empire, a grin stretched perpetually across his face. He burns brighter than all the rest, as though his life force cannot be depleted. But it will be, one day. Meyer knows his friend can die only one of two ways: he will be killed, or he will bleed himself dry. He worries, but his words fall on deaf ears, and so Benny remains a brother and a weapon, as mercurial as Roman mythology, commander of this corruption.

* * *

Charlie moves constantly, like a shark, like he will die if he doesn’t. He circles and stretches, slaps backs and breaks noses; makes violent gestures, makes gentle ones. He wears his shoes out on carpet and tile and concrete, taps staccatos on on armrests, tosses and flails in his sleep.

But he is stock still when he stands in front of the table, in front of the dagger and freshly slaughtered chicken laid on it. He stares at the blade with a terrible look, all wide eyes and tight lips, a set jaw and knotted brow. Meyer sits on the other side of the room, patience beginning to wear thin.

Then the tension drains out of his body and he throws himself into the chair behind him. “Three years and I ain’t ever had to learn this shit,” he snarls, eyes stubbornly locked in place.

“It’s worth learning, Charlie.” Meyer takes a glance at his watch; they’ve been at this for half an hour already. “For you especially.”

“We don’t _need_ it, though.” He manages to tear his eyes away from the dagger to fix them on Meyer’s instead, intensity undiluted. “We’re makin’ our own thing, none of that traditional shit.”

“Yes, but we’re not there yet. At some point you’re going to have to get closer to the people at the top, and that’s going to be _very_ difficult if you can’t even _think_ about their magic, traditional or otherwise.”

Charlie’s eyes flit back to the table, fingers sinking into the leather arms of the chair. “Those old fucks make blood pacts cos if they don’t, they just—massacre each other. That ain’t _famigghia_. Fuckin’ vampires is what they are.” His voice softens the slightest bit, though not enough to take the edge out of it. “You an’ me—we don’t even need blood pacts, Mey. I ain’t ever thought about that cos we don’t _need_ it.”

There is a short pause and noise spills in from the street below. A lazy balmy breeze twists against the curtains, windows flung open. “It’s just a show,” Meyer murmurs. “It stops when you come home.”

They sit like that for a moment, and it could almost be peaceful if it didn’t feel like the air has been changing for the past few months, like time might be running out.

Then the stillness is shattered by Charlie, who leaps out of his seat and makes a beeline for the liquor. “It’s too damn hot. You need a drink? I need a drink.”

* * *

As it turns out, he needs three. Maybe it’s just the comforting effect of the amber in the bottles—he downs his before Meyer is done his first—but after that he picks up the dagger and marries his blood with the chicken’s in a deliberate motion, touching it for no longer than he needs to. His faces contorts and his body strains and the chicken, untouched by Charlie’s hand suspended over the table, twitches as though a current has been run through it. Small game, practice before that distant final prize.

“Good thing that bird was dead,” he tells Meyer that night. A pause. “They call it respect, or _trust_ , but it’s only outta fear that a guy won’t bloodwalk his pact buddy off a cliff.”

He’s probably right, but Meyer has been reading books, ancient ones that threaten to come apart in his hands like ash. There are ways to forge a one-sided pact, to give yourself control over another person and remain free yourself. The preparations involved are convoluted and dangerous, but he is sure he can improve them, weaken and strengthen in accordance with their needs.

And they are no strangers to manipulating the laws of magic. With the exception of some street kids, the three of them appear to be one of the few that have realized that there are no concrete laws in magic, not really, not except for the cardinal rule of exchange between mortal and angel. The rest is wide open if you know where to twist.

Blood magic is a new frontier, and the one-sided pact will be a challenge, both to improve and to learn. But in the end it will be something new, part of their own language. Despite the name, shadows are not a popular medium in traditional shadow magic. Naturally, then, this is where Meyer gravitates to. It hadn’t been an intentional corruption, and Meyer doesn’t think of it in those terms at all. The changes they make to magic are done quietly, shared between him and Charlie and Benny. They are innovations, adaptations; creatures born with added features to outstrip the old, or without vestigial structures to weigh them down. Theirs is a quiet magic, deep cover, an ear pressed to a closed door, a symphony in the heart of the woods.

He starts by listening to shadows, a concept realized and left behind in the Dark Ages, found again by Meyer late at night—centuries later in a book from Northern Italy. The idea is to use dark energy to duplicate vocal transmissions though darkness, any darkness. The less light, the clearer the broadcast of conversation in his mind. He hears deals being made, crimes being committed. Sex, violence—sometimes both in one breath.

“Come on,” says Nucky Thompson, muffled—perhaps his lamp is on, “let’s be reasonable.”

“Thirty percent,” says Masseria, smothered almost to the point of inaudibility.

“It’s only discipline in part,” says Rothstein. “I _would_ like to apologize on their behalf, however. They are young and reckless.” Then he is cut off; somewhere across the city he has been illuminated by a sudden beam of light.

It’s a work in progress.

They don’t name it, though, because sometimes a name creates boundaries. There are no boundaries here, only something constantly shifting and changing as it is played out by the three of them. Certainly they are not the only ones that have thought to play with magic in this way, but they are the best, and they know how to keep a secret. Even Arnold, who they involve less and less in their plans as time goes by, does not know about most of it. But he is no fool, and Meyer suspects he is becoming wary—maybe even that he is afraid of them surpassing him. Which eventually they will, inevitably.

* * *

Arnold calls Meyer to his office one day, late autumn, early winter. He sits on the same chair from the first time he had sat before his mentor—only he had not been his mentor then. He had been a god to the kid dressed in his hand-me-down-best, cuffs rolled up twice—this man of means who had looked him in the eye and made him an offer.

There are no offers now. Meyer has the vague sense that this meeting is a poker game, and they are playing for something neither of them can name. He is twenty-one years old and rising, he is equal to—sometimes better than—everyone that shakes his hand, even if they do not know it. This knowledge sits quietly inside him, crouched like a small animal, a sleeper agent, like a boy crossing an ocean at the bottom of a ship. He looks at the man that had effectively replaced his father for a few years and sees dark under-eyes, hands that don’t move as quickly as they used to. But maybe this is nothing new, maybe Meyer’s eyes have just gotten sharper.

They talk about Meyer’s plans, about Charlie. Meyer tells him nothing substantial, just enough to make him proud, but nothing more. Any desire to elaborate is snuffed out immediately when Meyer remembers that white-hot rage he had barely managed to conceal in front of Charlie and Masseria, in front of Rothstein. The numbness that had spread down to his wrists like frost. (Vampires, he thinks, swallows it, tucks his anger behind dark, immutable eyes.) They talk about poker and politics—of course they do—and about the weather, how it shifts too slowly to notice until one day you do, all at once.

“I woke up this morning with frost on my windows,” Arnold tells him.

When he leaves, Meyer notices the office is colder than the hallway outside it. He decides to keep this conversation to himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the poem (Fortepian Szopena by Cyprian Norwid, in Polish):  
> "In those near-final days I visited you - / Filled with elusive theme - / Complete as Myth, / Pale as the mist... / When dissipation whispers to the issue of life's stream: / "I shall not tangle you - I shall but sublimate you...""
> 
> and then Charlie says "family" in Sicilian


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for violence

Winter comes and lingers. Meyer walks through hallways and doorways into rooms with high ceilings, plush upholstery. Always, Arnold is greeted before him. Always, Meyer stands one step back and one to the right, observing from under heavy eyelids. He makes the better choices, always, but they are not played out because it is not Meyer’s hands they shake, not his mind that skews the odds. He remains impartial and he learns, from the best and the mistakes they make, guarded and gaining ground by the day.

Books and theory can only cover so much—and besides, there’s something tantalizing about learning firsthand. Probability manipulation, though subtle, takes effort; the more potential outcomes, the more effort, the more life leeched away. It is easier to manipulate a coin toss than the roll of a die, the roll of a die more than a shuffle of the deck. Rothstein is good at this, so long as he isn’t losing. Here, panicked, a rabbit staring down the barrel of a shotgun, he begins to make mistakes, manipulating on larger scales in a mad scramble back to that golden victory. Meyer will admit that he can be rather good at hiding it, for what that’s worth.

“You never _really_ know a man until you play cards with him,” he tells Nucky, and Meyer thinks of prophecies as he follows the two of them downstairs. The air smells faintly of rain and iodine, of the Floridian thunderstorms hanging suspended over the scheme Nucky is offering Arnold. Of something gathering on the horizon.

The evening builds like this into the night, events and remarks piling up precariously one on top of the other. For all of his tricks, the game does not play in Arnold’s favor. Meyer’s nerves are wound up tight as violin strings, and normally he can bury it and move on, but today—with each mistake, each of Nucky’s unsettled looks, each stupid comment—a violent energy wells up inside him, and as much as he tries to suppress it, he can’t stay still.

It is nearly dawn when Arnold finally snaps, and Meyer closes his eyes in the moment, feeling his insides growing cold. “Don’t look at him,” Rothstein tells the poor dealer, whose eyes of course cannot help but to flash back to Meyer for a moment. “Don’t look at him.” Meyer is not the player. He is the advisor, and he places a steady hand on Arnold’s back, suggests that this has gone on long enough, that he is not as subtle as he believes himself to be.

They stand up to leave, but not without incident from the man that has been doling out these remarks all night. Meyer watches everything unfold with his breath caught in his chest. He decides to remember this moment, places a dark tick beside it in his mind. 

Standing there, he watches Arnold’s retreating back, and abruptly—like a spring day—he finds himself before Nucky Thompson, an excuse for Arnold on his tongue and an offer to follow. Sometimes he is not sure why he stands up for people that won’t do the same thing for him, but in the moment he is acting on this strange brewing energy, at once wild and rational, white fire. His mind is as clear as a diamond and when he takes the offer Nucky had intended for Arnold, it is without magic dancing on his tongue. There is a deal, a handshake, and for a moment Meyer’s nerves loosen with promise.

But Thompson wants something from him, first. A sentimental fact, some kind of binding phrase to prove that Meyer is more than the hand he plays.

He tells him about his trip to America, but only the bones, none of the details—like sating vultures. “My father was a weak man,” he tells him. “Never… stood up.” Maybe these are not the right words for the situation, but they are honest words, and Nucky nods.

What Meyer does not tell him is that he has no father, has never had a father. That he left Grodno without a goodbye.

* * *

There is a cold milky dawn and it rises ever so slowly, dragging itself over the eternal ocean horizon like a wounded man. Meyer waits patiently, a terrible thing spring-loaded in his chest, in his arms, in his jaw. He breathes evenly, cool as a switchblade, and runs through what he knows, biding his time. Luxury, and lack of it. Victory, and lack of it. Love, and lack of it.

Control.

Then the door opens and the man with the dark tick beside his name walks out.

And lack of it.

Meyer knows better than anyone that words have weight, that they can pull and fracture just as easily as fists or fire. But in the thick of it all, his words are important only to him. These words in a language he is intrinsically bound to, hissed out between hot breaths and clenched teeth, pounding a steady heartbeat tattoo until the concrete beneath him is dark with blood.

Magic is a frivolity, he thinks. In the end there is blood and there is nothing else.


	5. Chapter 5

Frenzy pours through the streets. The Roaring Twenties are aware of their not-so-distant end, and Meyer is certain they won’t go quietly as America rides out the tail end of the mania.

He watches the wave from afar. It slams hardest into the stocks, an opportunistic tribe of lemmings leaping one after the other to what he is certain will be their grave.

Something is coming. There is the high and, inevitably, there is the low. Perhaps there will be a grace period, but—no matter if it is short like a Northern summer or extravagantly long—it will end, and as it stands Meyer does not trust America. He puts his faith in the future and the closely guarded plans he and Charlie repeat over and over as the nightlife buzzes in the streets below.

* * *

It is 1928 and summers across the nation are winking out like lightbulbs.

* * *

Even in the lingering heat of September, Rothstein’s office is frigid. Meyer sits stiffly in his sleek suit, checks his watch discretely.

They talk about nothing. It is the last time they play out this tired scene, and they talk about nothing, as though there will be more time in the future. Arnold seems desperate to prove something, to pull a final victory from the ashes. Meyer leans back in his chair, imagines cities falling into the sea.

“And it’s the funniest thing,” Arnold tells him, “I can’t make any sense of it. I keep seeing these birds—magpies, if I’m not mistaken. Perhaps it’s their season—though if it is I’ve never noticed it before. Ah! There’s one now, does that look like a magpie to you?”

There is no magpie.

Meyer walks out into the vestiges of summer, but the cold lingers.

* * *

The Earth lurches further from the Sun. Meyer is busy scheming and adding and shaking hands. He improves the one-sided blood pact some more, after years of working on it. He reads The Picture of Dorian Gray; he laughs when Benny—who decides on a whim to give out candy that Halloween—ends up trading it all for drinks.

It is almost like Arnold’s death doesn’t happen. Except of course it does, of course it does—but it feels like nothing at all, like the lack of something. His old mentor is shot and dies two days later, quietly, and Charlie has to take a moment when he hears the news, averts his eyes and stands in silence for a few seconds.

Meyer reads about it in the papers, he hears it firsthand over and over, sometimes with respect, sometimes with sorrow, sometimes with a muffled chuckle. “Were you two close?” someone asks. Were they? Meyer walks through the days feeling nothing, feeling cold and removed. Everyone around him shifts and explodes and he stays the same and it doesn’t make any _sense_ to him. He imagines that maybe somewhere along the way a thread deep inside him was cut; all those neighbors and friends and all that family crawling along the edge of a razor—perhaps there is a reason for his heart like a clenched fist, like a secret. He imagines that cold thing he took from Grodno has been growing inside him all this time, a tumor.

* * *

A funeral is arranged and Meyer attends, dressed like an undertaker.

He arrives early, stepping into the plain room, empty save for a tall woman standing at the window, all sharp angles and straight, uninterrupted lines. And the casket, a glossy mahogany. Closed.

The woman—Carolyn, it must be—turns her face away from the window to check her manicure. “Meyer, is it?” she drawls, voice washy in a bored way.

“Yes,” he says, taking off his hat. She must have seen him through the window. He takes a moment to peer through it from the other side of the room; no one new cars have pulled up. It is a cold, clear day; the sky is a brilliant blue. “You must be Carolyn?”

“Mmm.” Slowly, languidly, she turns to him, face impassive. They look at each other through the rows of empty black chairs, wraiths with nothing to say.

“I’m sorry,” says Meyer, to fill the space. “He was a great man.”

Carolyn smiles, though it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I’m sure he was.” She checks her reflection in the window, picks at an eyebrow with a red fingernail, and drapes herself over a chair at the edge of the room. “Let’s not make this awkward,” she says, craning her chin up to the ceiling.

“Fair enough,” he says, and crosses the room to sit a few chairs away from her. He would offer her a smoke—he gets the feeling she needs one—but this is a funeral, and he isn’t sure about the rules of smoking during such a thing.

“You knew him, yes?” She swirls a hand in the air, making a show of looking for the right word. “Professionally?”

Meyer looks at her and she stares back. “He was my mentor a while back, and we’ve done business.”

“Business. Mm. You know, maybe it’s just me, but every time a man uses the word _business_ , I lose a little faith in him.” She looks to the front of the room, the casket, and blows out a thin stream of air through her lips as though she has a cigarette between her fingers. “You can imagine how I felt about Arnold, then.”

Meyer is at a loss for words. He steals a glance out the window. Still no one.

“You’re _quite_ the motormouth,” Carolyn says, deadpan.

“Well correct me if I’m wrong, but showing respect at a funeral is generally the—well, the entire purpose.”

“What goes around comes around.”

They both stare at the casket for a bit. It is bare, flowerless.

“He never told you about leeches,” she says suddenly, caught between a question and a statement, “did he.” Their eyes meet, both pairs cool and aloof.

Meyer frowns. “Not that I recall.”

“But he _did_ mentor you in magic.”

“To an extent.”

“So he didn’t. Mention it, that is. Funny.” She smiles in a way that makes Meyer think it isn’t very funny at all. A silence unspools into the room, and he is sure she is done speaking until, with a sharp exhale, she continues. “It’s a colloquialism, so naturally he hated it. Gone a bit out of style, too, if your generation hasn’t heard it.” Another pause, neither of them blink. “It describes an angel that takes more than its due. It usually ends up killing whoever its connected to, but for as long as that poor sap is alive, they’re _powerful_ when it comes to magic.” The lilt of her voice sounds almost sarcastic, mocking.

“…Was that the case with your husband?” It would explain some things, he thinks, and in his mind flash images of bodies strewn through the streets, too hungry to ever feel anything else.

“My _husband_ ,” she says, eyes still piercing through his with a vengeance. “People rarely mention the dead man’s name at funerals, I’ve noticed. But no. That wasn’t the case. There was nothing wrong with his angel. He woke me up one night to tell me he’d seen it standing over him.” She snorts. “‘Like the Grim Reaper?’ I said.”

Neither of them look up as footsteps sound in the foyer, echoing as they approach the room. Carolyn keeps her eye contact all the way to the door as she goes to greet the attendee.

* * *

The room fills, mostly with businessmen, gangsters. Meyer greets them, exchanges pleasantries and futilities, but somehow it all feels wrong. Invasive.

He sits somewhere near the front and at some point—gradually—the room slips away into mist and he stands on a cobblestone street before a man boarding up a small shop—what was probably his livelihood, shuttered. Snow twists in ropes in the space between them. Meyer’s clothes are too thin and he shivers in his boots, but he stands there until the man turns around, exhaustion weighing down his limbs, draped over his movements. The skin on his face sags like he has been deflated. He stares at the boy in front of him, or maybe he does not. Meyer is not sure. Maybe those dark eyes see nothing but the snow, or nothing at all. The man turns back to his work and Meyer, after a moment, moves to stumble on into the white.

He blinks and abruptly the room is alive with movement—everyone around him is standing up to leave. The room is warm; the funeral is over. Someone chuckles and Meyer does not stay to find out who. He grabs his hat and walks silently out the door, out into the crisp blue sky that is not quite autumn, not quite winter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading this! fun fact: writing this probably gave me an ulcer


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